The Living Blood

by Tananarive Due

  “This is really one of Khaldun’s Collections chambers, so you’ll find many reminders of your world here. The brothers often bring Khaldun gifts from their expeditions, and his collection is extraordinary,” Teferi said after she had entered the large cluttered room, which was draped with banners, flags, and other historical items. Teferi talked over Fana’s sobbing. “Pillows from the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, which are quite lovely. . . . That fabric on the wall is from the mast of a ship of Juan Ponce de León, where one of our Higher Brothers served as a navigator; it’s a pity he’s always in meditation now, or he could tell you some fascinating tales of that. . . . Ah! You’ll be especially interested in this painting depicting the Ethiopian Battle of Adwa, where Dawit was a cavalry soldier in 1896; Ras Alula’s Ethiopian forces surrounded the Italians in that battle, killing thousands of them, you know, which is why Ethiopia was never colonized by Europe. Dawit received that painting as a gift from the palace of King Menelik II . . .”

  But Jessica’s head was throbbing with Fana’s cries, and the mention of David’s name didn’t help her. She couldn’t look at the painting. This was all too much, too soon. She was afraid she might faint again.

  “Teferi . . . thank you. B-but I need to get Fana to bed.”

  Teferi gazed at her warmly, and Jessica realized she was probably a mess, if she looked anything like she felt. Teferi’s face seemed to swim before her. She couldn’t believe it had only been a few hours since they’d first left the hotel to begin the journey to the colony; it seemed like days. Glancing at her wrist, Jessica realized with disdain that she must have left her watch in the hotel room. Damn! She had no idea what time it was, and she hadn’t seen a single clock since their arrival.

  “There’s an enclave in the rear of the chamber with a hot mineral pool and a cool fountain for drinking,” Teferi told her. “You’ll also find a toilet, which I hope you’ll recognize despite its cylindrical shape. I can point it out to you . . .”

  “I’ll find it,” Jessica said.

  “Do you have any questions before I go?”

  Questions! Jessica had too many to even think about, much less voice aloud.

  “Why is there a naked guard outside my door?” she said wearily, choosing a practical one.

  “Oh, yes, it was silly of me not to explain—the colony is temperature-controlled, of course, and we have found over time that we have little use for clothing, except in ceremony. Khaldun is teaching us to learn detachment from our simple flesh form, so we rarely think of modesty.”

  “Yeah, I wondered about that, but that’s not my question. Why is there a guard at all?”

  Here, Teferi paused. The long day had worn on his face, too, because he could not even produce his usual gracious smile. His eyes seemed to dim slightly. And Fana, still sobbing into Jessica’s chest, was too upset to probe Teferi’s head and be any help this time.

  “Mrs. Wolde . . . let’s just say that the guard provides mutual protection. His name is Berhanu, and if you need anything from him, only think his name to call him. He is highly advanced. He will be able to hear your thoughts even thirty yards away. He can also distinguish between a real wish to summon him and your casual or unconscious thoughts—the word for those thoughts in our language would translate to noise. Noise makes up the majority of most people’s thought patterns. That’s why actually sending a thought to someone is much more difficult than you’d think. But Berhanu has skills enough for both of you, so if you want him, he will come.”

  Jessica felt a surge of helpless irritation. “So I don’t get any privacy at all?”

  “Berhanu is very discreet. Believe me, he is your friend.”

  Yeah, unless I try to walk out of that door, Jessica thought. How friendly will you be then, Berhanu, ol’ pal? Huh?

  If Teferi heard any of that last thought, he chose to ignore it. “I am sorry your first day has been so trying for you,” Teferi said. “I hope your mood will improve when you’ve had your audience with Khaldun. It will be soon, but you may have to forgive Khaldun’s delays. Time passage is very altered to him, understand, so what feels immediate to him will seem much longer to you. I will prod him as best I can.”

  Remembering the image of the man floating above her, Jessica couldn’t help feeling disconcerted. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible. “Who is he, Teferi? I mean . . . is he . . . ?”

  “Is he God?”

  Uncertainly, Jessica nodded. Once again, her heart stirred, pounding.

  “It is best if you ask Khaldun to tell you who he is,” Teferi said, although this time he was smiling broadly. “He has lived longer than any other man on this earth, since the time of Christ. He has gifts that far surpass any of my brothers’. Many of us worship him, as you saw.”

  The time of Christ! Again, Jessica felt her senses fading.

  “Who do you think he is?” she whispered.

  At that, Teferi reverentially lowered his eyes. “He is my Father. He has shown me my Path. All that I am or ever will be, I owe to Khaldun.” It sounded like a prayer.

  Gazing at Teferi, despite her own growing awe of Khaldun, Jessica’s rational mind began to wonder if this colony was nothing more than a glorified cult. The thought made her squirm—especially since she knew Teferi and Berhanu were listening—but she couldn’t help it. Teferi had been right; it was nearly impossible for her to control her thoughts. The more she tried not to think the word cult, the more the word rang in her fuzzy head.

  And something else, too.

  She kept imagining the scene from The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lion all discovered that the Great Oz was just a huckster behind a curtain. That had always been Jessica’s favorite scene, when Dorothy realized she’d always had a way home and she didn’t need the wizard at all.

  • • •

  Her daddy was a monster!

  Fana had heard her mommy think that word about her daddy before, monster, but Fana had never believed it, not really, until she’d seen for herself. Now, she knew what a monster looked like.

  As soon as the man who played the funny noises at dinner had gotten close to her, even though he was covered up, Fana saw inside his head and learned he was her daddy. She was glad at first, until she saw how he really looked beneath all the white wrapping. It was a face that would give her bad dreams. It was a face that she didn’t think people could have, not real people. Only monsters. His entire face was fire.

  Nothing could make her stop remembering her daddy’s terrible face, no matter how much she tried. She didn’t feel better even though she’d seen The Man floating in the sky, and she knew she was close to him now. Very close.

  “Honey, it’s all right,” her mommy said to her. They were alone now, in their own room. Mommy sounded tired, because Fana had been crying a long time. “Shhhhhh. We’ll be leaving here soon. You hear me? As soon as we see Khaldun, we’ll leave and go back home.”

  “Pr-promise?” Fana said. She was hiccuping, as she always did when she cried really hard, because she couldn’t get any breath. Mommy was rocking her in her lap, which felt good, but Fana would have felt even better if her mommy wasn’t so tired and sad and scared.

  “I promise. We won’t stay here.”

  But Mommy’s thoughts were really loud now, pounding like a drum, and they rushed at Fana in the air. Mommy was really thinking OhGodwhatthehellhaveIdone and Jesuspleaseletusbeallright. Mommy didn’t really know if they would be able to leave, ever.

  Before he left, Te-fe-ri, the man who talked all the time, had tried to tell them what a pretty room they had, and he’d talked about the stuff on the walls and he’d shown them their bed, even though it didn’t look like a bed because it was so big and round. And it didn’t feel like a bed, either, because it was squishy almost as if it were filled up with pudding. Nothing here looked the way things were supposed to look.

  Especially her daddy.

  And he didn’t act like one, either. He’d run away from them.
First he’d been nice to Mommy, holding her hand, and then he’d just run away, so Fana hadn’t been able to get inside his head anymore. She’d tried, but it didn’t work because he was too far from them. And he hadn’t even looked at her! He’d loved Kira very much, but he hadn’t looked at Fana at all.

  She hiccuped again, and cried harder, until her stomach hurt.

  And her mommy was so busy soothing her, trying to tell her everything was all right, that neither of them noticed how one of the purple pillows behind Fana—the one Teferi had told them once belonged to some kind of em-pire—was no longer lying still.

  Every time Fana sobbed, the pillow jumped a half inch into the air. Whenever Fana remembered how scared she’d been of her daddy’s face, and how he hadn’t even looked at her, or the ugly pictures she’d seen in the mind of the man named Kaleb they had passed in the hallway on the way to dinner, the pillow behind her jumped and shook. Fana would have been very surprised to know she was doing that.

  If Fana or her mommy had turned around and seen the shuddering pillow, they might have thought it looked exactly like a beating heart.

  20

  “I expected you’d be in your little house pet’s arms by now.”

  A voice awoke Dawit, and he rolled his eyes dolefully to see Mahmoud standing over him.

  “If you’re here to compound my misery, please go,” Dawit told his olive-skinned brother, who had recently taken to wearing a beard. Dramatically, the shaggy, dark hair from Mahmoud’s head hung down his back nearly to his waist, a mane.

  Even after speaking only a few words, Dawit’s throat raged in agony. The soothing cloths on his skin, for all their chemical potency, could do nothing for the pains still bedeviling his insides. And while the incense he was breathing had quieted much of his internal suffering, especially in his lungs, the tissue in his throat stubbornly punished him, refusing to heal. More and more, he was beginning to fear it never would.

  In all of his deaths, Dawit had never taken this long to heal.

  But then, he had also never been burned alive, reduced to a heap of charred bones and flesh. And by his own brothers! Dawit would gladly have accepted any punishment from Khaldun—even the excruciating burning—but he still could not fathom that his suffering had been at the hands of his Life Brothers, especially Kaleb. And they had drawn out their torture, extinguishing the flames at intervals, then alighting him again while Dawit writhed and screamed himself hoarse. Mahmoud had told him his screams could be heard from one end of the colony to the other, even in the meditation chambers.

  Nothing Dawit had ever known compared to the agony of it, not knife nor noose, nor even drowning. After their ship sank in the Indian Ocean in the late 1600s, he and Mahmoud had both drowned from exhaustion within sight of land after three days of fruitless swimming, which they’d often agreed had been both their silliest and most hellish experience together. Still, Dawit would have chosen to relive that grueling event five times rather than suffer the burning even once.

  If he’d been given a choice.

  Kaleb had chosen his torture well, because its effects still lingered; the burning had been a severe strain on Dawit’s system, and the rejuvenation was horrendously slow. The healing might take a mortal’s week, or even longer, one of the Mystics had told him. A mortal’s week! Dawit’s internal clock was still attuned to a mortal’s perceptions because he had only returned to the colony a year before. A week might be a meaningless concept to his brothers—the Life Colony had no use for time measurements in increments fewer than six months, and their bell only tolled once every thirteenth month—but to Dawit a week was a very long time. Would this horror never end?

  Almost worse than the pain, to Dawit, was knowing how disfigured he was. He had only been able to bear the sight of his own face once, when Mahmoud had helped him freshen his soothing cloths, and he vowed he would not look at himself again until he had healed. All of his flesh was charred with deep rivulets of blistering, raisinlike raw tissue that made him unrecognizable as a man. He was an atrocity, little more than a walking corpse.

  “Brother, you are too low for ridicule,” Mahmoud said to Dawit now, answering him softly. He walked to the stone tabletop jutting from Dawit’s wall, finding a large red pomegranate there Dawit had hoped to be well enough to eat soon. Mahmoud ran his fingers across the indentations on the fruit’s thick skin, then sliced it open with the knife on the table. He dug in with his fingers, scooping out the sweet pulp. “To ridicule you would make me a coward. I am here because I was praying you were ready to heed reason.” His mouth was full when he spoke.

  “Ah! What says Reason today?” Dawit closed his eyes—thank God his eyelids had finally grown back after three days. The inability to close his eyes had nearly driven him mad!

  “Reason is constant, Dawit. Never changing. That’s why it appeals to me so. The only puzzle for me is—how can I make it appeal to you?”

  Today, Mahmoud’s voice was only gently laced with sarcasm. There was none of the rage that had marked his visit to Dawit the day of the burning, when Mahmoud’s warning to Dawit had proven nothing less than prophecy itself. Stop this, Dawit, Mahmoud had said, or terrible harm will come to you. But Mahmoud hadn’t suddenly developed any gifts of future sight or thought interception; neither of them had yet been disciplined enough to awaken any talent in those areas. Dawit knew that Mahmoud’s warning had come in the spirit of friendship alone.

  “If I were reasonable . . . what choices would I have?” Dawit asked him. “She is already here.”

  “Oh, that she is. I hear she managed quite a disrespectful show during Khaldun’s greeting.”

  “She fainted, Mahmoud. Is that a sin?” Dawit sighed, weary. Was Mahmoud only pretending, or was it truly impossible for him to find any empathy with her? As many mortal women as they had enjoyed together in the four hundred years before Mahmoud became a Searcher, he could not believe his friend had no memory of warmth or affection for the gentle creatures. He had once seen Mahmoud sing all through a day and a night to woo an Ashanti chief’s daughter from her hut! But it might be best not to remind Mahmoud of that, Dawit thought.

  “I was almost sorry I wasn’t there to witness the dinner spectacle myself, but I’m too vain to see myself burned. I’ve grown so attached to my face and skin, you see,” Mahmoud said.

  “You have no worries, brother. Kaleb’s wrath is for me alone.”

  “Don’t be naive, Dawit. I’ve already been asked why I’m allied with you.” Now, Dawit heard a hint of Mahmoud’s anger. “To hear you speak so turns my stomach! Either you’re pretending ignorance, or you’re an even bigger fool than I imagined.”

  Dawit didn’t answer. Responding to that wouldn’t be worth the pain.

  Besides, Mahmoud was right. The burning had taught him that this dispute went far deeper than he’d expected. Of course his brothers were angry with him for violating the Living Blood; out of deference to them, Dawit had confined himself to his chambers since his return to the colony, waiting for Khaldun to awaken from his long Sleep so he could beg forgiveness from his father and learn his punishment. And with a mortal’s sensitivity to time, that year had passed slowly for him, monotonously. Yet, he had been obedient and waited.

  They should have burned him then, even. But for them to wait until Khaldun was awake, and to attack him after Khaldun had urged their Council’s vote to allow Jessica to visit—that was an insult to Khaldun’s authority! Dawit still couldn’t believe Kaleb had been so bold.

  And so far, at least, Khaldun had not answered the insubordination. Why not? Kaleb, it was said, had even been whispering that Khaldun could no longer be trusted, since he had so easily thrown aside the Covenant that bound them all. And Kaleb had uttered the words aloud, not merely in his mind. Any true Khaldunite—and there were many of them, including Kaleb’s fellow Searchers—should have cut out Kaleb’s tongue and forced him to eat it for such open blasphemy.

  Clearly, sides were being drawn. The tension at the colony wa
s without precedent.

  And the fault was his.

  “I ask you again, brother,” Dawit said. “What can I do? Do I exile myself?”

  “That’s no longer enough. With her arrival, the damage is done.”

  “What, then?”

  “Denounce her. Convince Khaldun to imprison her and the child. Offer to undergo a punishment of the brotherhood’s choosing, to placate Kaleb. That might bring peace again.”

  “What punishment would please Kaleb, if he is not pleased now? He would ask Khaldun to invoke his Ritual of Death for me! If that’s more than just a myth . . .”

  “Then so be it, Dawit,” Mahmoud said, not pausing. “Perhaps it has come to that.”

  Dawit blinked, stunned by his friend’s words. The word brother was too weak to describe what Mahmoud was to him, because Mahmoud knew Dawit’s soul as well as he knew his own. Unlike their other brothers, he and Mahmoud had been friends even as mortals—bound in blood when Dawit had married Mahmoud’s sister, Rana—and they had chosen to follow Khaldun’s promise of immortality together. Those many years ago, they had been only ignorant merchants trading between Abyssinia and India, and now they knew the world like no other living men. They each had at least a hundred languages at their disposal, which they had drawn upon often in their extensive travels together. Even now, they most commonly addressed each other in Arabic, since it had been their first common tongue as mortals. The language, like their friendship, was pure habit.

  But Mahmoud had changed. Seemingly overnight, he had decided to become a Searcher. Instead of enjoying the treats the mortal world offered, he had chosen to embrace celibacy and police the brothers who roamed away from the colony. In Mahmoud’s quest to embrace Khaldun’s laws as a Searcher, his allegiance to Khaldun had turned to zealotry. That allegiance had nearly destroyed their friendship after Mahmoud was dispatched to tear Dawit from his wife and child. What a test for them both! Despite their love for Khaldun, and each other, they had been poised as foes. They had fought, and Dawit had been forced to attack his brother, for the first time in all their days.